Well THAT just figures! In the words of Emily Litella..."Never mind..."

Hot off the presses: California has released their first-half of February enrollment data: 100,228 people have enrolled in Private QHPs in "the first 2 weeks" of February (actually February 2 - 15, I assume, since the 728K number includes Feb. 1st). This breaks down to 7,159/day:

Nearly half of those covered [through 2/01] — 728,410 Californians — selected a Covered California health insurance plan. This strong enrollment trend is extending into February, where in the first two weeks more than 100,000 individuals enrolled in Covered California, increasing the cumulative total enrollment in Covered California to 828,638.

California's January enrollment rate was (728,410 - 498,794) = 229,616 / 35 days = 6,560/day, which means that their February enrollment rate is actually increased from that of January, by over 9%!

So, how does this impact the "February Drop-Off" factor? MASSIVELY! Take a look:

Yes, that's right. As I said yesterday:

"good news out of a couple of large states such as California or Florida could completely change this scenario."

This is the perfect example of that. In one shot, California has changed the likely February enrollment total from 32% lower on average per day (a 45% drop overall when taking the 4 weeks vs. 5 weeks factor into account) to only 9% lower on average per day (a 27% drop overall).

This morning I was projecting roughly 625,000 total private February enrollments: 1.15M x 80% = 920,000; 68% of that = about 625,000

Adding California into the mix, I'm now projecting roughly 840,000 total private February enrollments: 1.15M x 80% - 920,000; 91% of that = about 840,000

IMPORTANT: This also shows how volatile the performances between the different states are in February--Kentucky is currently enrolling people at 20% of their January rate, while California and Hawaii are outperforming January. Lousy February numbers from big states like Florida, Texas or Illinois could still drag these numbers back down again...while overperforming numbers could potentially pull it closer to the million mark.

In addition, the second half of February may perform completely differently from the first half, since the cut-off for March 1 coverage was 2/15.

In other words...these numbers could still bounce around a lot, but things are looking a lot better now than they did an hour or so ago.

UPDATE: OK, since the California press release also finally includes a "paid/unpaid" breakdown (80%), I've re-run the spreadsheet dropping all of the CA numbers down by 20% to only include paid enrollments. The CA avg. per day stays at a 9% increase over January, but the impact on the overall numbers is lessened a bit, so we're now looking at roughly an 11% drop instead of 9%. This suggests more like 820,000 February enrollments instead of 840,000, but the overall point is pretty much the same: